~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ “Do you know how much violence it took to be this gentle?” ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Wax was not always a healer. She was born into the clan when even the wind breathed whispers that obedience was devotion. Obedience was holy. She was raised beneath the gaze of The Ancestors from youth. Her mother would remind her to be strong in every step, her father would push her to be resilient, and her siblings were always play fighting with slips of newborn claws. Her family was rigid in their faith of The Ancestors. Praise was earned in enduring the worst. A scraped paw was met with warnings to learn from the incident. A torn ear for approval. Death in service of honoring the clan. Wax believed it all. /Believes/ it all. She grew into a large and thick-furred wall, giving her a softness that she never felt she would never feel allowed to embody. She trained hard. She fought harder. As a young warrior, she earned quiet renown. “Wax can hold a line.” ”Wax could take anything and keep standing.” ”Wax can beat a badger.” She wore it like medals. For show, though most never had merit behind them. More in theory than in practice. Patrolmates relied on her weight and endurance. She learned to think of that as her purpose. She did not try to think of herself as anything else. It happened on a border patrol at dusk. A fox burst from the brush without warning; red fur and teeth and feral, thoughtless instinct. Wax didn’t hesitate, threw herself between it and her patrolmates without thinking. She fought like something feral and unbreakable, the way everyone always described her. Claws buried in muzzle. Teeth sunken into ear. Fur flying in thick clumps. She held up, for awhile. But foxes do not tire the way cats do. Her patrolmates did not try to help her when the fox began to get the upperhand. They believed she could handle it. When her muscles burned from exhaustion, her jaw tensed from all the strain. When the fox, that clever thing, found her faltering, it struck twice as hard. Her front left leg was pulled out of socket in the jaws of the fox, dragged up a way it couldn’t for any quadrapedal creature, ragged with the way the teeth tore unevenly through the flesh. She remembers the sky spinning. The weightlessness of being flung. The copper tang of her own blood. She remembers trying to stand. Remembers the way her clanmates finally went into action when she couldn’t get up anymore. … Her leg healed wrong. She didn’t blame the Healer, didn’t blame the fox, she did not even blame her clanmates for holding back. For their cocky pride. She blamed her own incompetence. They praised her bravery, her service, her determination at first. It waned after a few moons. She’d hear murmurs from others; ”Half the cat she once was.” “Whats the use for a wall that doesn’t hold like it’s supposed to?” ”The Ancestors give and they take. So is the way.” She overheard something on her way to the preypile one night. ”Peaceful,” a cat had said, she never saw who, “we send Wax there with a few others who are… unfit. She’ll lead them marching like she always has, even with the leg. The badgers should enjoy a meal. Keep them away from the territory.” Murmurs of a group planning to leave the hallowed camp reached her ears too. Wax should of accepted her fate, her death that the clan planned for her. It was what The Ancestors would of sought for her. Yet… in the face of death, for the first time… she faltered. Unlike that day with the fox, she felt fear for her life. When the cats that would come together to leave Ashclan left, she too followed. Emberclan was small, those first few moons. They needed warriors. They needed believers. They needed a healer. Wax could no longer be the first. So she became the third, too scorned by belief to try at it again. She had no formal training in herbs, but Wax knew wounds. She knew how flesh tore. How infection smelled, how it formed. She knew where joints were and what it looked like when they swelled. How scars could be uncomfortable when the weather was too cold. Wax practiced what she could on herself; when she would get aching paws, she’d try different poultices. When some of her older wounds acted up, she would find ways to soothe them. She tested things on herself more often than she would ever consider even asking for others to help her learn. She would never be quite the warrior of Ashclan that she once was… and in some part of her, it was a good thing. if she could not be the wall they all expected of her, then she would take to repairing the walls that remained.
